Critical Writing

I don't think writers always have to strive for conscious awareness of everything they're doing in their prose. But sometimes you need to cut under the flesh of a story to the bones. How important is word choice, sentence length, paragraph length to producing a specific effect, such as creating suspense? What makes some dialogue sound stilted, other dialogue sound natural? How does punctuation change the flow of words? To analyze such qualities I think it’s best to begin by studying the work of other writers, work that you are not so close to as your own. I’d suggest you choose writers for study who are better than you.

One possible strategy is to retype passages or stories that you are interested in studying, not as a mere exercise but as an honest attempt to understand the process the other writer followed. Don’t even allow yourself to edit the other writer’s work at first—which you’ll probably want to do—but faithfully reproduce it before going back and trying to make it your own. Retyping a story this way puts you in the writer’s shoes, with your feet on the stones of the trail that he or she followed. Just reading a story, even if you’re trying to study it, is more like driving that same trail in a Jeep. You might see the obstacles, but they won’t bruise your heel. You need those heels bruised.